Valentine’s Day, our way

Valentine’s Day is well celebrated here in New Zealand by the young ones, with cards, flowers, chocolates, outings and no doubt with skimpy undies too.  As a pair of older and wiser Kiwis, this is how we celebrated Valentine’s Day on Sunday.

We have a Sunday morning tradition of a cooked “bacon and egg” breakfast – rustled up as usual by Robin.  Then as a little treat I had brought us some Whittakers Chocolates, made in New Zealand by brothers Andrew and Brian Whittaker.  They have persuaded the lovely Nigella Lawson to travel to NZ to make a series of TV ads, so that proves how good it is!

Whittakers chocolate, made with love in New Zealand

Then I spent a little time in the kitchen preparing a creamy potato salad, chock full of extra goodies such as crumbled bacon (Robin cooked extra at breakfast time) chopped hard boiled eggs and spring onions.  The trifle for dessert was next, layers of sponge cake, custard, boysenberries and blue berries - not  too hard to make at all.  With food prep out of the way, we could relax outside under the sun umbrella, just chilling out.

The “piece de la resistance” of our evening meal was a leg of tasty New Zealand lamb cooked on the Weber barbecue.  I’d been wanting to try this ever since we went to a BBQ demonstration and the staff  sliced it up for customers and prospective purchasers to try.  Onto the BBQ it went flavoured with sprigs of rosemary and it ended up looking like this!

Leg of lamb for dinner

It was a lovely meal, even if I do say so myself, and we enjoyed a glass of sweet dessert wine.  But although I enjoyed sipping away at the lovely sweet tasting wine, it never agrees with me and I always end up with a bad head!  I’m not much of a drinker and I guess it says something about my low tolerance to alcohol!  With coffee and chocolate to finish, we were well satisfied.

I do hope you enjoyed Valentine’s Day in your own way, sharing it with someone special.